Review of Thurston Clarke's "JFK's Last Hundred Days"

by Luther Spoehr

Luther Spoehr, an HNN Book Editor and Senior Lecturer in Brown University, teaches several courses about America in the 1960s.

When Thurston Clarke’s JFK’s
Last Hundred Days was published on July 16, the author may well have
channeled Louis XV:“Apres moi, le deluge.”Clarke’s book is an early wavelet that
presages the literary tsunami now bearing down on us as the fiftieth
anniversary of the Kennedy assassination approaches.With titles such as Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House; The Kennedy Years: From the Pages of the New
York Times; We Were There:
Revelations from the Dallas Doctors Who Attended to JFK on November 22, 1963;
and If Kennedy Lived (described as an
“Alternate History”), treatments of
John F. Kennedy’s thousand days in the presidency range from the nostalgic to
the hypothetical to the straightforwardly historical, with, inevitably,
occasional glances at conspiracy theories.

Clarke’s subtitle—The
Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President—suggests
that his book is primarily Hypothetical History, but that is not entirely the
case.The author of a dozen books,
including one on Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign, Clarke does spend
a lot of time pushing the argument that in his presidency’s final months Kennedy was a man who had changed for the
better, both personally and politically.But JFK’s Last Hundred Days is
also well grounded in evidence, as Clarke seeks to “solve the most tantalizing
mystery of all: not who killed him, but who he was when he was killed, and where he would have led us.”

The book is at its best when examining “who he was.”It is less persuasive when asserting “where
he would have led us,” if only because the latter requires that the reader
believe more in the agency possessed by charismatic leaders than in the
limitations imposed by context.Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr., once characterized JFK as a realist disguised as a romantic
(Bobby, he said, was a romantic disguised as a realist).JFK avoided fights he wasn’t sure he could
win.While that fundamental character
trait might have helped to reinforce his reluctance to get more deeply involved
in Vietnam, it also would have restrained his willingness to spend political
capital on politically explosive issues such as civil rights.

The good news is that the reader needn’t fully accept Clarke’s
thesis about JFK’s transformation and the future direction of his presidency to
appreciate Clarke’s clear, briskly written, fine-grained rendition of Kennedy’s
personal and political doings from the middle of August 1963 to the fateful day
of November 22.Nor is Clarke really
saying that Kennedy waited until his last Hundred Days (will historians ever
get away from the “100 Days” trope?) to turn significant corners.Like many previous analysts, for instance, he
highlights JFK’s American University Speech as a turning point.On June 10, the President whose leadership
had helped to take the world to the brink of nuclear war in the Cuban Missile
Crisis emphasized the common interests of the US and the USSR:“In the final analysis, our most basic common
link is that we all inhabit this small planet.We all breathe the same air.We
all cherish our children’s future.And
we are all mortal.”Calling for (and
achieving) a limited nuclear test ban treaty significantly reduced Cold War
tensions, a remarkable achievement for someone who until recently had been a
conventional Cold Warrior.

The very next day, after federal intervention had been
required to desegregate the University of Alabama, Kennedy went on television
and declared,“We are confronted
primarily with a moral issue.It is as
old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.”No president had ever made as strong a
statement about the need for racial justice.

Clarke goes further than the standard analysis, however,
when he argues that, had he lived, Kennedy would have gotten his Civil Rights
bill through Congress—that Lyndon Johnson’s fabled arm-twisting and ability to
take advantage of the grief over the assassination wasn’t really essential.(He even contends that Kennedy was actively
figuring out how to get LBJ off the ticket for 1964, probably to be replaced by
North Carolina governor Terry Sanford.)

Clarke also has little doubt that Kennedy would have cut
back and then eliminated American military involvement in Vietnam—despite the
strong opposition of many of his own advisors, civilian and military.There is evidence to back him up, but he
doesn’t always fully consider evidence to the contrary (for instance, he gives
substantially more weight to Kennedy’s September 1963 interview with CBS’s
Walter Cronkite, which seemed to suggest that Kennedy would not immerse the
United States any further in Vietnam, than the interview a few days later with
NBC’s Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, which seemed to say the opposite).

Clarke also spends a lot of time on what he sees as
Kennedy’s personal transformation.His
“compulsive womanizing,” which Clarke does not shrink from recounting, had made
for a wobbly marriage, but Clarke thinks that the early August death of their
newborn son, Patrick, brought husband and wife much closer together.Looking at everything from Jackie’s private
comments at the time to the couple’s body language in newsreels,Clarke paints a portrait of a marriage on the
mend.(His health was apparently on the
mend, too, once he got more reliable medical care than had been provided by the
publicity-seeking Dr. Janet Travell.)

There are a few factual slips:Pennsylvania’s governor David Lawrence is
“William”; Nicholas Katzenbach, the Justice Department’s brave representative
at the Alabama schoolhouse door, is “Richard”; William Bradford, not John
Winthrop, is credited with the phrase “City on a Hill.”But overall, Clarke’s vigorous narrative is
propelled by its vivid details.

Clarke recognizes that Kennedy “was…mourned for his promise
as well as for his accomplishments.”He
admits that “’What might have been’ is speculation,” but insists that “what
Kennedy intended to do is not.”To all
of which, the reader can only say, again and again, “Well, maybe.”Would those intentions have changed?Would his resolution have held? Would he have faced down the hawks, who were
numerous and influential, on Vietnam?Would he have taken more political risks to support the civil rights
movement if he thought it would endanger his prospects for reelection in 1964?And if he took those risks on Vietnam and
civil rights, would those moves have succeeded?We’ll never know for sure.JFK
remains the great “what if?”That is why
his brief presidency, even half a century after its sudden end, remains the
source of both fascination and frustration.